Email Deliverability: Hotmail

Hi all. Has anyone heard how Square is handling deliverability? I assume we are all on shared IPs which I know innately is difficult as that means whatever others are doing wrong in email will hurt the group. However, in the last 2 weeks I am seeing all Microsoft (microsoft, hotmail, outlook, msn) email addresses are bouncing. Customers that had been receiving emails are no longer getting them, including our cheese club members. Have others noticed this and is there anything Square is doing to fix it?

I don't know how to check our DNS settings with Square, if anyone knows how to do that I would like to see if msft has it blacklisted.

I had the same issue a while back and it turned out the emails were getting flagged because of a poor sender reputation. I ran an ip blacklist check https://www.inboxally.com/spam-database-lookup on the sending domain just to be sure and found it was showing up on a couple of lists. Once that was cleared and I adjusted some DNS records, things started working again. Might be worth checking your IP status too.

Email deliverability to Hotmail can be tricky with their strict filters. I tackled this by running every address through MailTester.Ninja my ultimate bounce killer that verifies emails and keeps my sender reputation clean even with Hotmail domains. This email checker and finder cuts bounce rate by 98% and supercharges every campaign. Once deliverability is sorted, I take a well-deserved break offline. Practical topic, glad this forum covers it.

Hotmail and other consumer email providers can be particularly sensitive to sender reputation, authentication, engagement, and list quality. If deliverability suddenly drops, I'd check SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce rates, complaint rates, and whether old or inactive contacts are still being mailed. Contact research is another part of the equation because outdated information can create unnecessary bounces. SignalHire explains how additional professional contact information can be connected to an existing email address: https://blog.signalhire.com/how-to-find-phone-numbers-linked-to-email-addresses-a-complete-guide/ . Good list hygiene should always come before scaling an email campaign.